Professor David Peimer
Albert Speer: The Repentant Nazi

Professor David Peimer - Albert Speer: The Repentant Nazi

- So today for me concludes this section on the Nazis specifically and the war period. Next week, we’re going to do the remarkable filmmaker, Fritz Lang, worked in Germany and Hollywood, and then after that, we’re going to some of the post-war Reich filmmakers, Herzog, Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, et cetera. So what I thought would be really interesting, and it’s always, well, I suppose fascinated the wrong word, but I felt to be really important was to look at the life of this man Speer, and what did he actually know obviously? What did he actually create, in his daughter’s words, as the myth, the myth of the good Nazi, the repentant Nazi, et cetera? Phrases, which are completely repugnant and quite frankly disgusting to me. But what did he do and how did he create these myths, and how did he get off, basically, at the Nuremberg trial, get off from being sentenced to death? And, you know, he got 20 years, I’m sure most people know. So I thought, because it does resonate today for us, all these decades later, and I’m going to suggest a reason why. In looking at the question for me, who was Speer? How did he get only 20 years? What was the image that he crafted during the trial? What was the myth that he made and the myth machine, as his own daughter called it, the Speer myth machine, and how that resonates for us today, this idea of what is truth and lies, the role of myth making? What is the myth that he made and persuaded at least some of the Allied judges? And I think it sets up the debate between the man and the myth and the role of not only the media but the role of cultural perceptions in making these myths. And I think that it’s so resonant for us today, and, of course, it goes way back to this guy, and the man, the myth, and the reality.

Does reality today lie somewhere in a grey zone between the man and the myth? Can we call simply this is the individual and this is the myth? Does the perception of cultures and societies lie somewhere between the two, or is it a polemic? What’s the role of fantasy in all of this, the role of fantasy of the individual and the role of fantasy of a society that wishes to believe in at least some kind of myth like this, even just the words good Nazi or the repentant Nazi? The role of fantasy not only of the individual involved but the society. And I think it’s critical in trying to understand evil and understand how evil propagates and emerges and lives in the memory of a culture or the imagination of a culture. Two other points is that when Speer came out of Spandau Prison in the mid 60s, and he published his book “Inside the Third Reich,” which was really about, you know, inside Hitler’s court or, you know, those years that he was inside it, and he was right at the heart of it, as I’m sure many know. That book was a huge bestseller. So he wrote it. Whether he wrote it in a clandestine or less clandestine way while he was in prison is open to debate, but it was published shortly after he came out. It was a huge, phenomenal success commercially, not only in Germany but globally sold. And he got onto the lecture circuit, speech circuit in the West primarily, all over. And in a speech to a group of university students in America, one of the students interestingly asked him, “What would you say to a modern politician today? What is the most important quality?” And, of course, this is going back to the late 60s and early 70s when he was, you know, mostly touring, giving the speeches. “What would you say that a politician most needs to succeed?”

And he thought about it for quite a while and then answered. He said one word, “Charisma.” And afterwards, in some private conversations, he wrote a little bit about that and in a couple of letters and linked it to the idea of what we supposed loosely would call myth in today’s words, charisma, charisma being the quality. I think because in a media obsessed culture, in a mythmaking machine in his times, the radio, and then, of course, in our times, you know, obviously television, the internet, film, et cetera, it’s all of it working together to portray perceptions and images of charisma. I think the other idea that, of course, goes to me is the Faustian bargain, you know. What was the deal that he made with himself in order to escape the hangman’s noose, and what was the deal he made with himself, possibly even during the pre-war and the war era and, of course, afterwards? A classic I would say Faustian, not just Germanic, I would say Faustian bargain, where, you know, one sells one soul to the devil in the Faustian myth and story of Gerta. You sell your soul, and, in return, you get payback, you know, for various things. What I’m going to do today in looking at these questions is focus on what others said about him and what he himself said in a couple of interviews because I think that’s how, this is firsthand response. This is not second, third-hand people writing about this guy or biographies or whatever. It’s direct much more, you know, first and secondhand. So when I show a few clips, I’m going to show from the Nuremberg trial itself where we see Speer talking and making his, I suppose you could call it a collective guilt or collective responsibility claim and then a couple of interviews with someone within the “Charlie Rose” series with Gitta Sereny, who Speer approached to write this biography about him.

So he gave her the biggest access to himself as a person and his claimed memory and history, and she wrote probably the first very important book about him. Of course, there’d been others subsequently, and there’s a couple of interviews with her, which I’m going to show. Okay, moving on to the next slide, please. So these are some of the pictures of Speer. In the top left, Speer at a concentration camp, and we need to remember that he was minister, he was not only Hitler’s architect, as we all know. He joined the Nazi party before the Nazis came to power, two years before. He joins in 1931 as a fairly recent graduated architect. Father was an architect who later, when Speer was becoming Hitler’s favourite architect, Speer went back to his father, who was also an architect, showed him some of the drawings and plans for what he was going to do, design, and his father said, “You’ve gone completely mad.” His father was anti-Nazi, anti the kind of grandiose, monumental, fascist architecture he was creating based on some of the Roman and, you know, ancient Roman and other examples on this ridiculously monumental scale, which dictators love so much. It’s so interesting that father-son clash because there’s been a lot of speculation about a father-son relationship between Hitler and Speer, Speer, of course, being much younger than Hitler at the time he brought him on and that Hitler had wanted to be an artist and then an architect, and here, he found this young, for him, protege, you know, who he brought right in as the architect first and then later during the war in the early 40s as his minister of armaments. Top left, he’s there at a concentration camp. This is when he’s already minister of armaments, and he’s employing probably, we reckon 10 to 12 million slave labourers in the German armaments, war-making factories and machines all over Europe, obviously in Germany but all over.

40,000 concentration camps, you know, some of them smaller, some of them bigger. Of course, we know the main, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and the others, the extermination camps, but, of course, many slave camps as well. So, you know, the labour is coming directly to Speer. Interestingly, at Nuremberg, his number two, Fritz Sauckel, was sentenced to death, and he was his number two, and he pushed the image that he didn’t really know so much. He should’ve known but didn’t know, and Sauckel was really the one who had organised the slave labour and the deaths of so many in the slave labour camps working. So the top left, underneath, picture of Speer, obviously saluting, and then we see two images, the top right from the BBC interview with him. This is after he comes out of prison. He’s published his book. He’s become a notorious or a celebrity hero, celebrity interviewed, became very, very rich. On the left, another image, a much more classic image, perhaps, from the war period, minister of armaments dressed in the costume, dressed in his uniform, very different image, but those eyes, what Gitta Sereny called something very slick and others called, you know, this slick veneer of cultured, very polite, very mannered, middle and upper middle class educated German individual. Okay, if we go on to the next slide please. This is Speer again, the important picture we all know, I’m sure, when Hitler goes to Paris in June 1940, and that’s Speer on the left, and he’s wearing his SS hat, cap, rather, his German cap, and Hitler in the middle with the Eiffel Tower at the back. So Speer is next to Hitler on his trip primarily to Paris, you know, the Eiffel Tower, goes to Napoleon’s tomb, et cetera, and the train where, of course, we all know where the Vichy government signed, et cetera. So Speer is right there.

Speer on the next picture, he’s in a picture here with Willy Messerschmitt. He was in such close terms, not only with the designers of the aircraft of the Messerschmitt but the industrialists. Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was one of the very early supporters financially of Hitler before he came to power when Hitler promised the industrialists he would not nationalise these huge industries. So Thyssen and then later Krupp came on board, yeah, and others and so on. Speer directly connected to these massively rich and important and powerful industrial magnates, and, of course, Hitler, his surrogate father figure almost, I think, and, of course, the elite or the ruling group of thugs of the Nazi party, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels himself, et cetera and so on. The picture I’m trying to draw is that he’s right up there. He’s in the central circle of Hitler’s. To my mind, there is no way that he could not have known all of what was going on. He’s right in the inner circle fuhrers, and he gets up the ladder very quickly, but he has this constant image that he is projecting and understands how to project certain images of himself during the pre-war war and obviously post war when he gets out of prison period. Okay, I want to bring on to the next slide, please. This is one of the early model drawings, which we all know so well of the Nuremberg rally in 1934, which Speer became the architect designs and, you know, creates, et cetera, et cetera, and, of course, then for the Berlin Olympics. You know, he’s the main architect and for Hitler and his own mad fantasy of the new Berlin, which will be the capital of Germania of the envisaged 1,000-year reich and this massive, and he went to see to look at the architecture of ancient Rome and other areas of the ancient world in order to model certain approaches with a grandeur of dictatorship. If we go on to the next slide, please.

Hitler commanded Speer to build him a brand new chancellery, marble gallery textures, colours, 480 feet long, twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles just outside Paris. A picture I want to draw is that this guy comes out as an architect young. He’s taken up by this megalomaniac Hitler as his favourite son, his favourite artist, architect. Goes for many conversations, many walks with Hitler in Berchtesgaden. He’s right inside the inner circle, but he’s much younger than a lot of the others. The others resent him because he’s seen as a young up and coming, but Hitler is very close to this guy apparently, projects perhaps some of his own artistic and agricultural, architectural ambitions on him, and the young Speer is infatuated with Hitler and, of course, is ruthlessly ambitious himself to go up the ladder of power and wealth in the Germany of these times very quickly. He goes up so fast at such a young age. Ambition, drive, belief in his own artistic and architectural abilities, praised by the only individual that matters to him, you know, his fuhrer and so on and brought right in. And in a way, not discarded, but seriously criticised by his own father he was close to to a certain degree. To get a sense of this individual because I think what’s so important is that how did this guy become the one that cultures afterwards could even want to use the phrase good Nazi or repentant Nazi or the Nazi who said sorry? I mean, you know, how did this individual craft and feed that mythmaking machine, if one likes? And I think it’s important because I think we can see examples today of the mythmaking machine and how to feed it but also how individuals go from early adulthood through power later and what are they propagating about themselves? Okay, if we go to the next slide, please. Thanks, Emily.

So this is at the rally in the mid 30s. This is at the rally of Nuremberg, and he created what he called the Cathedral of Light. These are all obviously, you know, search lights, which would normally be used in wartime, search lights, which are incredibly powerful for the times, you know, and there we see these pictures that we know of. This is Speer’s architectural creation. These are images from the film by Leni Riefenstahl, “Triumph of the Will.” I showed some of these clips last week, and we can see this is what he wanted. Of course, right in the centre at the back would be the individual, you know, and the rest are all the ants, the masses of these conforming soldiers, SS members, et cetera, all around here. And the Cathedral of Light, so how the light creates shadow, how it creates impression, which burns into the imagination, I think, of people watching and even us today so many decades later and, you know, this idea of light and shade and dark and colour created through light, obviously, but a theatrical sense of grandiosity and mad obsession with power in architecture, which is well studied and well known by many people, but he is putting it all together in a 20th-century context, this guy. So the mindset of what he’s creating and the mindset of him going up so fast of the ladder of ambition and power is really what I want to suggest. Okay, and on such a scale that, of course, Hitler would really like it. There were over, they reckon, 150 light beams arranged around these Nazi party, this one Nuremberg and other rallies, and Speer called it his Cathedrals of Light, that he would create as often as possible. And that word cathedral, so he’s giving a religious or a pseudo-religious connotation to a kind of artistic aesthetic, which it’s there in this work.

Okay, if we can look at the next slide, please, and here we get a better close up picture of the same thing. We try to imagine being one of those individuals or, you know, one of the ants in hundreds of thousands there looking up at this, the awe and splendour. Then we go back home and we tell the 20, 15, 20, 25 people we know quite closely at work, family, friends. Word gets out so fast. So it’s not only the films but these individuals going back home to their towns, villages, cities, farms, wherever in Germany and spreading the word, pictures being sent out and, of course, the film. Okay, if we can show the next one, please. And here, of course, we get it again, you know, but this this is from Riefenstahl’s film, where the only individual that matches, of course, is Hitler in the middle there speaking and all the massed soldiers and Nazi party members all out there in the front all around. So this incredibly theatrical, dramatic effect, it’s the linking of theatrical with this is a party rally. We need to remember, it’s a rally. It’s not about, you know, before they go off to war the next day. It’s a rally, and it’s got to have religious connotations. It’s got to be so theatricalized for our contemporary times, and, you know, for me, what we talk about a lot is how contemporary society needs constant feeding of theatricality and dramatic sequence of events in order to keep it fascinated, obsessed, interested, terrified in totalitarian and other societies. Okay, so we can look at the next one, please.

So this, you get another picture, in a sense, trying to show a sense, if we were right in there, what would we experience, not only what would we see, but what experience would we be imbued with? In theatre, we talk about what’s the experience that we’re going to take the audience through? Not just they’re going to see a play, they’re going to, you know, see the story, the actors, et cetera, but what’s the experience which their imagination is going to be impressed by and remember years and years later and talk about and share, word of mouth and all the rest of it, get out with? It’s that sense of the artistic aesthetic used to create experience, which he understood, you know, as a pseudo artist and, you know, as the architect as well and which I believe Hitler understood, not only, you know, in his obsession with Wagner but also, of course, theatricality, his own practise of speaking, use of body language, that voice, all the rest of it. I think they understood it, and obviously, Goebbels understood it and many others. Bring it into the portrayal of rallies, of politics of the times and being amongst the first in the world to use such modern technology and the notion of mass media to do so. Okay, so what I want to do now is I want to show the first brief clip, which is a couple of minutes, and this is from the Nuremberg trial of Speer. All the pre-war images we’ve been looking at and the role of this guy and his position in the context of Hitler and the Nazi party. And then this is the moment he takes the stand, and this is the moment where he claims this idea of, if you like, diminished responsibility, collective responsibility. He never says the words, “I’m guilty.” He just says, “I was responsible. I should have known. I could have known, but I didn’t actually know.” It may sound like a complicated defence today. It’s a lie in my opinion, complete lie, which I’m going to show examples, the reasons why later.

But it’s the beginning of understanding that he understood mythmaking from early on, the Cathedral of Light, these images of the rallies that I was showing. He understood how to make myths as an architect and then as the minister of armaments for Hitler and minister of armaments responsible not only for millions of slaves working and dying but responsible for the German war machine. You know, it’s often speculated that he’s partly directly responsible for the war continuing that extra period longer after all the bombing. What did he do? He handed over to the industrialists. He said, “You run it. I’ll bring you all the slave labour, pay them virtually nothing, starve, die, more and more into slave labour. You run it according to modern factory techniques. The state won’t necessarily run it. You know, I’ll claim the glory. You’ll run it,” and also, he fixed the quotas, the numbers, et cetera. So that link with the industrialists, with the Nazi party, with Hitler, the leadership, with the artistic ability, all of this shows a sophisticated, intelligent man, very intelligent, able to see the links amongst all these different players at this time, and this is the couple of minutes clip from the Nuremberg Trial. Will you show it please, Emily?

CLIP BEGINS

• [Narrator] As Speer sat through the films and listened to the harrowing accounts of witnesses, he was often seen to have tears in his eyes.

• [Judge] Will you state your full name please?

• Albert Speer.

• After me. I swear by God.

• But when Speer took the stand on June the 21st, 1946, seven months after the trial had begun, he did something that would surprise everyone.

• [Judge] That I will speak the pure truth.

• Oh, his survival strategy was not to deny his association with Hitler. He admitted that because he couldn’t deny that, not to deny the pride he had as a young figure in the Third Reich, he couldn’t deny that, but to separate himself. This is very central to his strategy, to separate himself from the other high Nazis whom he knew we would discover were a bunch of thugs.

• [Narrator] Speer attempted to persuade the court that he had been swept along in the great tide of events with little or no influence over the evil heart of the Nazi regime and no knowledge of the Holocaust. Albert Speer did something unprecedented, something that would set him apart from his co-defendants. He resorted to an apology and an admission of responsibility, but it was an apology with a twist.

• Officially, what he said, “I didn’t know. I should have known, I could have known, but I didn’t.”

• I stated him I was in the witness box that I am responsible for all those things, for all slave labour. I didn’t avoid telling clearly to the judges what I did, and even I felt responsible when it were orders of Hitler, others accused of the accused, say, always were claiming that it were orders of Hitler. I didn’t do that.

• He never said, “I’m guilty.” He said, “I am responsible and I accept the responsibility as a member of that government.”

• [Narrator] It was a curious defence. Speer accepted culpability while denying any actual knowledge of the crime, a form of guilt with diminished responsibility.

CLIP ENDS

• I think this, in a way, puts it in a nutshell in these couple of minutes that exactly an acceptance of responsibility, diminished, et cetera, this convoluted way to separate himself from the others. Sorry, if we can go back to number nine, please. Thanks. So here’s this guy who he is portraying the sense of himself in exactly what we’ve said just here. What is he achieving? He’s separating himself from the other thugs, as John Kenneth Galbraith, and I’m sure many of us know of his wonderful work, who was there at the time, and he calls it straight. I agree with him. You know, the strategy. It’s not the truth, it’s a strategy. Secondly, separate from the thugs, Galbraith’s word, and spot on, how to separate himself, what to say, what to do, to immediately set up a different impression. The tears as he’s watching the images of the camps that were shown at the Nuremberg trials. So he’s creating a myth. He’s creating a narrative which begins and continues through the trial, continues through the sentence, the 20 years in Spandau Prison, and then coming out afterwards. And I want to feel, I want to suggest that he was aware of myth and reality all the time, going back to his rallies, Cathedrals of Light, these massive constructions and so on. All of these things which are feeding fantasy, obviously of Hitler, who primarily wants to impress, but he’s feeding his own fantasies of ambition, power, wealth, and he’s feeding the fantasies of the people that want it, want to believe in it. So I think that he understood, and it doesn’t matter if it’s intuitive or conscious, It’s there. He understood how to create and make myth and fantasy, make them real, make them believed to a certain degree, just enough so that he is positioned in a way as a creator of it all.

There’s a fascinating piece written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who I’m sure many would know is a really interesting, she is a really interesting Nigerian writer who’s published a number of novels, fascinating. And she wrote this piece about why was she fascinated with Speer, looking at somebody from a very different world and different life from what you might expect, and what was her fascination, not only Gitta Sereny, who’s obviously a German author and journalist, you know, interviewing and writing about him or other German, British, American, whatever, you know, but coming from Nigeria. And I’m going to just give some quotes from her fascinating piece. “Speer’s affluent but unappealing childhood, his sickliness, his distant parents who employed maids in white aprons, a kind of a theatrical place to grow up in, the distance between reality and himself, so, too, the palace intrigues of Hitler, Hitler’s petty court jostling for Hitler’s praise.” Seeing it already as a kind of Medici or whatever court, seeing it all as a theatrical, I think she gets it in these descriptions, Chimamanda Adichie. Speer wrote about the character of Hitler, spoke about the character Hitler, a man who’s magic. Speer often refers to, and he does, Speer in his book, he had a magic, a charisma that I mentioned earlier. It’s all theatricalizing fantasy, making it real though. “In Speer, Hitler is duplicitous and vacuous and ultimately delusional, and Speer describes Hitler’s fantastic misreadings of reality what’s happening with the war, yet Speer was devoted to him.

No, he was awed by him but knew he was delusional. How does the human mind cope with those two seeming contradictions?” I think she goes right inside and understands this guy’s not only psychology but, you know, the head space, and isn’t it so contemporary for us today in so many different countries, so many ways? She goes on, and this is what Speer, of course, after he’s come out of prison and he’s published and he is become world famous and travelling and giving speeches. His book “Inside the Third Reich” has become a phenomenal hit, success, et cetera. “Speer for me demonstrates a slick honesty.” Look at that clip from him in the trial. There’s a slick honesty. Look at those eyes of this guy I showed earlier. You know, there’s a slick middle upper class politeness, finesse, a dissembler, you know, who’s mastered the art of conceit and deceit. “He demonstrates a slick honesty where the goal is to disarm. His rueful acknowledgement of his dedication to Hitler, his philosophical puzzlement at his own complicity, an apparent naivety, an apparent puzzlement, a seek to cast a glaze of innocence over himself.” I think it’s such a brilliant insight. To cast an an image of innocence over such evil. “Speer, with calm handiness, calm cunning, and yet, look closely, and the edge is too smooth. His architect father, on seeing his models told him, ‘You’ve gone completely crazy,’ but what do we see? We see the silver tongue of Speer’s class privilege. That’s also what makes it possible. Speer’s very subtle class sneer is always present, always subtle, the polite finesse, never rude, never crude. In his book, he detests Martin Bormann. Why? He calls Bormann a peasant with no culture. It’s a feeling that is rooted in his assumption of entitlement emerging from his class.

He objects not to what Bormann did or does. He objects to the crude nature with which he does it, as though Bormann’s murderousness would not be so offensive had he exhibited some upper class sense of entitlement and finesse. The burning of the Berlin synagogues and the smashed panes of shop windows offend his sense of middle class order. The lightness, elegance. Evil seems to be tolerable for Speer as long as it is purged of coarse peasantry, that coarseness.” The word elegance supersedes the word rude. That is what he objects to in Bormann, again, not what he does, not what he did or any of the others, but the coarseness with which he did it, and I think that is such a profound and important insight into this guy who’s able to distinguish between evil act and how to get away with it in contemporary terms by not being crude and crass and peasant sounding language and words and gruffness, but a polite finesse, a sense of entitlement, a sense of, you know, to the manner born. “It’s Speer’s cultured reasonable manner that is the easy inheritance of the privileged few, represented a kind of Teutonic ideal and making of a myth of an image. It made possible his designation as the good Nazi during the trial and after he came out of prison. Yet who was he? A murderer who employed over 10 million slaves, hundreds of thousands dying in the most horrific conditions, who knew there were 40,000 concentration camps, who supplied the concrete, the steel, the objects to make and build the camps? He knew it all, ruthlessly kept a steady hand on it.

He kept the German war machine churning. He denied he knew that millions of Jewish people were being murdered every day. He burst into tears when he saw a photo of Hitler after Hitler’s death. He dreamt of victory parades and great halls. Why am I?” she asks herself, Chimamanda Adichie. “Why am I so fascinated by European tribalism? Why am I so fascinated by this character?” And she goes on and on and on. I wanted to bring that to share because it’s from an outsider from Nigeria who I think gives us remarkable insight into how people do it today, did it during this period, Speer being the prime example, and many others, probably before, but without, of course, the use of the media, his charisma and so on. Werner Heisenberg, and we all know that Heisenberg was the leader of Hitler’s nuclear weapons outfit. So Heisenberg, who studies under Niels Bohr, he knows them all, the great theoretical physicists, and, of course, what ultimately leads to the bomb. Heisenberg is leading the research to build the bomb for Hitler. The seriousness we obviously all get. Heisenberg told Speer. “Theoretically,” and I’m quoting, “Theoretically, nothing can stand in the way of building a bomb. It can be done by 1947.” The stakes are so enormously high. Michael Frayn captures us brilliantly in the play “Copenhagen” and in the film. “It would take 1,200 tonnes of uranium stock in order to build it by 1947.” That’s how close everything came. So Speer understood all of this. He gets it completely, but he also knows the war’s going to be lost. He also knows they’re not going to get the bomb before 1947. Going to cost a fortune and they need, you know, 1,200 tonnes of uranium, but they can do it. They can do so many other things. They could get that.

He’s also involved in the V2 project, you know, the V2 rockets that were sent out over London in England. So all of these things is what he’s doing, the so-called armaments miracle, doubling Hitler’s production orders, you know, when he is minister of armaments, and yet they’ve been bombed so, so heavily by the Allied Air Force. He does it obviously by millions of slave labourers being sent in. You die, you live, you know, on and on, produce, produce, produce, and giving it all over to the industrialists. US government official, the former investment banker Paul Nitze, who was vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, believed it was imperative to get to Speer after the war. How had Germany maintained its war machine while withstanding such heavy bombing? What had happened? Nitze and the economists, the really important and brilliant economist John Kenneth Galbraith that I showed in the earlier clip, was part of it, was working with Nitze, interrogated Speer for seven days nonstop shortly after arresting him. So Galbraith gets to know him pretty well, Speer, and, as Galbraith said, it was a strategy. It was all created. He knew that his best chance to survive was to seem indispensable to the Allies, and even the interrogator said, and I’m quoting Galbraith, “that he evoked in us a certain sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed.” And I think Adichie, she gets, understands why there’s a certain sympathy, certain portrayal. Can such a person be so evil? The Jekyll and Hyde again. He showed Nitze and Galbraith how the Nazi war machine worked. He had all the papers ready, how he’d followed Henry Ford’s manufacturing principles, how to run factories efficiently. Of course, he didn’t mention slave labour at the time. And when he was arrested, he says to Galbraith, “So now the end has come.

Well, it was all a kind of opera anyway.” He calls it an opera, this war, this murder, this massive, probably most important, powerful, terrifying event in human history? He calls it, “Well, it was all a kind of opera anyway.” All of this from this image I’m showing right now to the camps to everything is seen as that blurred line between fantasy, reality, and the man, the myth and the reality, that blurred area which so many leaders, politicians now using the media today know and understand. It was all a kind of opera. It was all a game. It was all a fantasy we made real on a stage, and then the stage is no more. He get it through these words. He shows you the theatrical aesthetic, if you like. You know, then there are many books that, you know, he wrote. Well, he wrote the book afterwards, many other things that happened. His contrition in court. He understands how to perform, how to perform entitlement, how to perform the polite finesse, the dissembler, the art of the conceit, the art of deceit. He understands the art of presenting oneself as a reasonable and highly civilised individual, unlike Goering and, you know, all the sort of coarse loudmouth thugs, what he attacks Bormann for, again, not what he does or did but his coarseness. So all of this goes on, and I suppose that what I want to say is this is how I think he created the mythmaking machine which saved his neck. And it wasn’t only that the documents, which I’m going to show that emerge later, they show of course he knew everything going on, and, of course, I think it could’ve been pushed there, of course, at the Nuremberg trial, he would’ve known everything. Okay, if we can show the next interview, please. This is the “Charlie Rose” with Gitta Sereny, who wrote the book about him.

CLIP BEGINS

• Gitta Sereny has made a career exploring the minds of people who commit unfathomable atrocities. She continues her probe with her current work “Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.” The second most powerful man in the Third Reich and widely regarded as Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer was the only Nazi leader to accept collective responsibility at the Nuremberg trials, but his struggled to come to terms with the individual guilt persisted until his death at age 76 in 1986. I’m pleased to have Gitta here to talk about this book, this man, and the ideas that are so fascinating to her and to all of us. Welcome. It’s great to see you again. Tell me the ideas that you have done that brought you to Albert Speer, who you first saw at the Nuremberg trials and when you first came into your innocence, to your cognizance. But you have been involved with the ideas of individual responsibility. You’ve also been involved with how good people and gifted people, intelligent people can come to such awful, awful atrocities and having to do with Nazis and concentration camps and also having to do with children. Having said that, tell me what brought you to Albert Speer.

• Well, I think you’re right. Just, you said it, and it’s all connected, you know? I’m very interested in disturbed children. So I wrote a great deal about children who kill, and then I became extremely interested in the worst part of the Nazi time, the extermination of the Jews. So I did a book called “Into That Darkness,” which was about the commandant of Treblinka, and I spent a long time with him in prison talking to him,

• Stangl.

• Franz Stangl. And, well, then Speer really came into my life quite a lot later in 1977, and he approached me, not I him. I didn’t really want to see Speer. I liked his books. I was very interested in his books “Inside the Third Reich” and “The Spandau Secret Diaries,” but I didn’t like the looks of him. I saw him on TV and he seemed to me too, I don’t know, too smooth, you know? And I didn’t like his consistent mea culpas. I didn’t believe him. So I didn’t really want to see him, and then he contacted me.

• Now, why did he contact you?

• Well, he had read “Into That Darkness,” which I gather moved him, and he had read an expose I did with a colleague, Lou Chester from the “Sunday Times” in London on David Irving, whose lies are exposed or we exposed, but I think it goes further than that. I think Speer was looking. He was looking for someone he could talk to. He talked, of course, to hundreds of people, you know, since he was released from Spandau. Let’s face it, he gave hundreds of interviews, but he could never say this thing which was weighing so heavily upon him, which was his personal guilt. He had tried three times before me, tried three people. One was a French pastor at Spandau. He was a wonderful man, Georges Casallis, then a Jewish rabbi, another wonderful man, Abba Geis, and finally a Catholic priest, Pata Atanajus.

• And why did it fail with them?

• Well, it failed with them because I think that they developed very definite views on how he should deal with his life. This is different from me finally, you see. My view, not my view but my feeling about whether it is Speer, and there is no comparison, you know, between Speer and the commandant of Treblinka, Stangl, or Stangl or whoever, is that if there is a heavy load of guilt, it is not just there for their good but really for our all good if they can somehow admit it. Now you can ask why this is so, and I would find it difficult to answer that question coming ahead of you.

• I want to interrupt. Now I want to interrupt you now and just make several points that I think are important. One is that Albert, I have always said Speer, and it’s Speer and-

• Speer.

• Okay, so this is the first clip, and if we can show the next clip, please, Emily. Thank you.

• That brings us to the central question of this. What did Albert Speer know, and how much guilt did he have about that, and how has he dealt with that guilt? And that’s what I want to turn to.

• His responsibility was certainly not for the murder of the Jews, except in a moral sense. In an actual sense, he had nothing to do with it. In a moral sense, he was responsible, as all of them were, for everything that happened. His direct responsibility was, as I put to him many times in this book, as you will see, was the death of literally hundred thousands of his slave workers. 14 million of them he was responsible for.

• Because he was the minister of armaments, and he was responsible for all those slave labourers who came to make the bombs that the Nazi war machine used.

• Yes, somebody else, of course, under him, if you like, who was, in fact, hanged.

• His subordinate was hanged.

• His subordinate was hanged, but he was not.

• And he got away because he accepted collective guilt. He said,

• Yes. “I accepted responsibility.”

• Responsibility. Collective responsibility,

• Right.

• not collective guilt.

• Collective responsibility.

• Yes, he did.

• For the crimes of Hitler, but he never acknowledged his specific crimes, and you think he’s been struggling with that.

• I think he’s been struggling with only one thing. He did not struggle with his responsibility, as I’ve just said, and of his responsibility for the death of the slave labourers. And he told me in so many words several times, and all of it is in the book, every time we talked about it, that he did not feel guilty about this. And I said, “Well, how could you not feel guilty about it? You know what happened to them. You know how they were treated.” And he said, “That was in the course of war.” He made a distinct difference between what happened in the course of war, not as a result of but in the course of war and what he came to believe happened outside war. It had nothing to do with war. The death of the Jews, excuse me, the death of the Jews had nothing to do with war.

• He was at that meeting in which Himmler made that speech in which Himmler in fact addressed Speer, among others, and took note of his name, in which he said, “The fuhrer wants to exterminate the Jews.” When you forced him to deal with that.

• Yes, he didn’t actually say the fuhrer. I mean, I wish he had, but he didn’t say that. But he did-

• He’d be-

• And we cannot be absolutely certain that Speer was actually in the hall when these words were pronounced. Speer has always claimed, including to me, that he was not there. I spent six months only on the investigation of that particular point.

• And your judgement is he was in the hall or not in the hall?

• My judgement is that we cannot know. You know, one has to simply look these things in the face, and we cannot, but it doesn’t make any difference whether he was there or not. From there, whether in that afternoon, that afternoon or the next morning, doesn’t matter, he went to Hitler’s headquarters. So did all these political leaders who were at this meeting. They went to Hitler’s headquarters, and at Hitlers headquarters, Speer had three meals with these men and Hitler, and then the very, very important night tea, which was Hitler’s very special meeting with his close circle. All women were excluded that night, they were always there, from that circle, and his closest aide, Nicolas Van Belov, was excluded that night from that circle, and Speer was there with eight of these men. Now it is totally impossible, impossible that that conference and what was said at that conference was not mentioned. It is impossible.

• And when you said it just that way to Albert Speer, what did he say?

• He said, “You cannot believe me, but it is true.” He was lying,

• Can we hold it there,

• but now can I just say this?

• please, Emily?

• He was-

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• Thank you. So I want you to show this because, you know, these tiny little details matter, at the conference and then after the conference, Speer being there, the meals, the three meals, that little bit of tea, all of that. As we know only too well, these are the areas, you know, just eight, and Speer’s one of the eight men talking with Hitler for that day and that night, that this is where the truth obviously lies and comes out. I think she only got to know later, Gitta Sereny, of some letters and documents which emerge later that Speer had kept covered up. I think she does fall partly into this idea of, well, did he know or didn’t he know? We can’t say for sure if he was at the meeting or not. In 2005, Speer’s daughter wrote her memoirs, and she said that, “After his release from Spandau Prison, my father spent all his time constructing the Speer myth.” That’s his daughter, 2005 memoirs. So I think all of this, and then a letter emerged much later dated December the 23rd, 1971. So it’s five years after he’s come out of prison, and it was in a correspondence with a lady who was a widow of a Belgian resistance fighter, and in the letter Speer wrote, “I was present as Hitler announced on October the 6th, 1943, that all the Jews would be killed,” quote. So that together with, you know, what she is saying here about the exact minute details, if you like, of this meeting and after the meeting, gives a whole different perspective of the cunning, the ruthlessness, the ability to create the myth, and also, of course he knew.

Of course he was there. Of course he was not the good Nazi. Of course he was not the repentant Nazi. It was a performance of remarkable proportions and sheer performance, but it fed something that, perhaps, and this is speculation on my behalf and others, that perhaps some in the Allies wanted to believe, needed to, perhaps, something in human nature needed to believe, think possible. Who can say? Can we go on to the next slide, please? Thanks. These are just more pictures of the same thing. We can go on to the next. Thanks. This was the image of Germania, the fantasy that I was talking about, the Berlin that was going to be built. These are all Speer’s architectural models, which he spent hours with Hitler pouring over and, you know, getting Hitler’s acclaim and praise. Can we go on to the next one please? The new capital of the Reich, was meant to be, you know, gone. It’s all for it being exhibited, and the next one. This was a massive series of constructions that were done for Hitler in order to house 20,000 Germans who would go on their two or three week holiday every year. They’re good German workers, they go to the seaside, and this would be their holiday and then go back to work. Speer, of course, is architect in charge of all of us. On to the next one, please. These are images of him, and I wanted to show. You know, the reason why perhaps I wanted to look at this is because the look is so different when we look at this guy compared to the other ones, you know, and how he’s trying to show a certain portrayal of himself to me, and in front, of course, of the judges at the Nuremberg trial, you know, and the world press obviously. And then the next slide, please. Conclusive. May the 30th, 1943.

This is sent to the Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler. “Iron and steel quota for the SS, especially Auschwitz concentration camp. Dear party comrade Himmler, on the basis of the report performing inspection of the Auschwitz concentration camp by my Messrs. Desch and Sander, I am prepared over and above,” this 1943 May, “above the iron and steel quantities allocated to you for the third quarter of 1943, the amounts of 450 tonnes,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, “and 80 tonnes,” et cetera, “to make a once only allowance of the following quantities: 1,000 tonnes of iron and steel; 1,000 tonnes of car steel tubes, which the SS to make available; approximate,” et cetera; “number four, the requisite quantity of eight to 20 millimetres hardened steel rod.” If we can go on to the next please. “These quantities of iron and steel are to be used only for the expansion or construction of the concentration camp, particularly Auschwitz. Unfortunately, I cannot allocate further iron and steel quotas for temporary construction requirements incurred by raising the new Waffen SS divisions. The requirement will have to,” blah, blah, blah, go on. “The overall iron and steel quota quantities allocated to the SS,” et cetera. “The individual allocation issues are to be determined between your authorities and my own raw materials office.” It’s the language of corporate. It’s the language of the manager. It’s the language of business. But what is the business? Supply the raw materials to construct the iron, the concrete that everything to make the camp. What is the purpose of the business? Extermination, not only Auschwitz, of course, Treblinka, all the other camps. “The requisition of requisition certificates of 1,000 tonnes.” It is so bureaucratic.

It is so corporate. It is so, you know, methodical and precise and technical. “Dispatch of the water piping has already been set in.” It is so detailed for the guy who’s the head of armaments for the entire German war machine and yet so specific about exactly how much iron and piping and steel for the Auschwitz concentration camp. “Yours truly, Speer.” “Handwritten” ‘cause there’s a part that’s handwritten at the bottom. “I was pleased that the inspection of the other concentration camps yielded a completely positive picture.” It was in Speer’s handwriting. These, of course, only came out much later, and had they been known at the time of Nuremberg, I doubt Speer would’ve got off, but they only came out later, and the letter that he wrote to the widow of the Belgian resistance fighter also only came out much later. Conclusive. If we ever want documentary evidence, not only evidence of who he met and conferences and whether he was at a Himmler speech or not, et cetera, you can’t know this level of detail, you know, of Auschwitz without knowing what on earth are you building. So putting aside, of course, he was as ruthless, as cruel, as cold and hard as all the others, and to me, it’s conclusive, and, to me, the horror of that compared to the myth and the man and the reality, the horror is so powerful as well of how the mythmaking machine, mythmaking desire can be constructed and effective, not only to get him to escape the hangman’s noose but to be believed for so many decades and so long during and after the war, and I think he understood all of it going way back to those early grandiose fantasies of the cathedrals, the religious Cathedrals of Light, as he called them. Okay, so let’s hold it there and thank you very much. We can do some of the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Rose. Ah, hope you’re well, Rose, and thanks for your emails.

“Speer’s son was also a famous architect.” Yep. “And says he only knew Hitler as a nice uncle. What does it tell us not only about that but the next generation?” Exactly, spot on Rose.

Faye. “I thought he was only released in the mid 60s.” Yes. Sorry if I said it wrong, but released in '66, sentenced in 1946, 20 year, '66.

Theresa. “My husband Norman, during his military service, 1957, was a consultant physician, British military hospital in Berlin. His duties included medical service in Spandau where Hess, Speer, and von Schirach served their sentences. He told his commander that, as a Jew, he found this quite traumatic. Was told, 'This is the Army, and those are your duties.’” Wow. That’s so powerful, Theresa. Thank you for sharing.

Q: Jack. “Isn’t it instructive that Ingmar Bergman, in his autobiography, was transfixed by the Nuremberg rally he attended as a student?”

A: Exactly. “In visiting Germany in the 30s.” I think exactly, Jack. The terrifying power when an artistic aesthetic and an artistic sensibility goes to the evil side.

“Hitler, failed artist started a failed poet.”

Q: Carol. “Were the great industries bombed or damaged to the point of not being able to continue productions that a long time after end of the war?”

A: Well, the great industries were certainly bombed and extremely heavily bombed, but, because they had such an endless supply of slave labour, dying, not dying, half dying, starving, killed, they could just keep going, rebuild quickly, rebuild it, and so on, and also using a certain approach to manufacturing, which was run by the industrialists. So they could have, you know, factories, industries built all over different places where sometimes the Allies might not have known when he took the state out of it, basically, or partly.

“Concerning Speer’s response about charisma, I believe it was Max Weber first developed the idea of yes, charismatic authority.” Absolutely.

“Authority can often derive from the charisma of the leader.” Yes, and I think what does charisma mean? I think it means the ability to make people believe in the myth and the fantasy. I think that’s what a leader with charisma does, gets enough people to believe in myth and fantasy and make it happen to a certain degree, and I think that’s where charisma is such a necessary part of a leader. You know, it might include charm and other things today with the closeup, the internet, and TV and film. You know, we have the leader in our home in our living rooms. So it needs a certain amount of charm with that, so the leader is seen every, every day, every night.

Q: Greg Murray. “What did Speer’s father object to, his classic designs instead of the new international Bauhaus style?”

A: It’s a great question, Greg Murray. His father, as far as I understand, objected, said he had gone completely mad to the grandiosity of these designs, that they were designed on a non-human scale. They were so huge and grandiose, you know, to put one person, you know, Hitler at the centre. Everybody else is just ants, this mass conformity, and the father, as far as I understand, objected to this ridiculous extreme of architectural presentation of extreme authoritarianism and the adulation of a leader and the reduction, total reduction of the individual human being.

Louise. “No disrespect to Gitta Sereny, but her interaction with Charlie Rose made the excerpts.” Yeah.

“But perhaps her six months thinking about whether the architect was present in the meeting in uncertainty was influenced by the charisma.” Absolutely, and I agree with you, Louise, you know, because there are interviews with her where she talks about interviewing Franz Stangl, you know, as we all know, the commandant of Treblinka, and she’s dismissive of Stangl as a limited man, very limited in intelligence and abilities and ways of thinking, but Speer is not limited in her mind, and I think there is a charismatic and charmed seduction to a degree of her. I agree completely. The whole interview goes on, and I think that she can’t resist despite herself. I agree with you. Great point. Yeah.

Q: Abigail. “How was he able to hide these certain specific documents?”

A: Well, I think he was probably, to a degree we don’t know, but lucky that these didn’t come out, I mean, that final one I showed and some of the others, you know, or he had hidden them before. He had ample time before. If he knew about them, he obviously did, he might’ve hidden them. You know, the one that I showed right at the end definitely.

Q: “Did his father survive the war?”

A: Barbara, great question. I don’t know, I’ll find out.

Q: Sylvia. “Last week, we saw in Buenos Aires a play called ‘The Hunter and the Good Nazi.’ Did Wiesenthal really meet Speer?”

A: That’s a great question, Sylvia, and I should know. It’s a play, but I don’t, and I’m going to find out straight after now. Thank you.

Catherine. “Even though the letters came out late, it must’ve been obvious. Minister of armaments, he knew.” Exactly ‘cause they required raw material, and not only the raw material, but what are you building, and what is the purpose of the building? Yes. The question his father asked him. “What is the purpose of this?” You know? These are government buildings which are meant to be for people to come and ask and find out, yes, bureaucratic, corporate, et cetera, but, you know, it’s meant to be for the masses to come and, you know, find out from the people, for them. Obviously it’s not. So he must have known definitely the raw material.

Q: “Might it be that the Nuremberg judges wanted, for whatever reason, at least one example of a decent Nazi?”

A: Yes. Well, I agree with you. And whether the judges were serving political masters, there were three judges who objected. Two Russian judges wanted him hanged, and Francis Biddle, one of the American judges, wanted him hanged. Those three wanted, but the other judges representing other countries and the other the America did not.

Q: Susan. “Many of the corporations using slave labour and supporting the war effort alive and well today, did they ever admit culpability? Hugo Buss?”

A: Hugo Buss designed all the uniforms, you know, the SS uniforms, all the rest, et cetera. Well, they had a small, you know, a fairly small shop in Berlin before and all the others that I’ve mentioned. As far as I know, there might have been a little bit of, not culpability, but, you know, I think they got off scot free, basically, in any real way.

Barbara. “My father worked as a slave labour in the Krupp factory. I want to write to the company CEO.” I think that would be so remarkably important, moving, and powerful, Barbara. Thank you for sharing that.

Tony. God, this is incredible, Lockdown University. I mean, it’s just so many people. We have so many connections all over, so much of this terrifying history.

Q: Tony. “How come there was no fruitful research done during Speer’s incarceration, which could produce sufficient evidence for a retrial? I smell a deal at the highest levels.”

A: I think so, Tony. I would agree with you because why did, the two Russian judges and one American judge were the only ones to vote for him being hanged. The other judges from the others didn’t. Why? That would be really important to find out. I agree, Tony.

Q: Galaxy. “Can we expend the Speer philosophy? I murder somebody, admit responsibility, but deny guilt.”

A: Yeah, it’s a great question, Monty, and I think that’s what it provokes for us today.

Susan. “He should’ve been hanged.” No question. In my mind, he was as guilty, as ruthless as the others. He was just perhaps much cleverer, but he understood the role of how to create what his daughter called the Speer mythmaking machine, that he did everything possible after he came out to perpetuate, to create the myth that’s in his daughter’s memoirs of 2005, and, you know, understood, got it. And I think many, many others, a reevaluation of the Speer myth and why it’s so important historically and also for us today, I think.

Okay, so thank you very much, everybody, and I’m sure it’s a difficult for all of us and traumatic thing, and this whole period has been full of obvious trauma for so many everywhere. Thank you for sharing, and next week, I’ll go into Fritz Lang, the great director. Thank you.